One last encounter at the motel

Too strange to omit.

The Housewife. Wallhaven.cc/tag/6549

One sight was too strange not to mention. The last two weeks at the motel Gomez hooked up with a perfectly normal looking woman in her mid-thirties. She had long, curly, black hair and the perfect, Jewish housewife look. She reminded me of Bob G’s wife from 1982 in every way, in accent, mannerisms, painted fingernails.

The other, younger waifs, changing each week, were shooed away once she became his regular consort from Friday till Sunday eve, smoking crack and having sex constantly and she moaning so loudly it would wake me up at four a.m., almost in alarm, sitting up in the dark until I realized where I was, like P.T.S.D., perhaps the only case ever caused by an orgasm. They acted as if I weren’t there, five feet away.

But I was there and in the intervals I had a chance to talk to her, especially Sunday afternoons. I asked if she was Jewish. She was. I asked if she’d ever been married. She told me she had a husband and two children, a boy and a girl both under ten. But now she was living down the hall. I asked her how long. She said three months. In disbelief I asked her if they knew where she was. She said they didn’t. They would never know and she wasn’t going back to that dull life.

This brought the fate of Sanita and Will uncomfortably back to mind. I knew things were going sour with Mark and didn’t want to meet him at this stage, as that might complicate matters. I knew she was in no danger of becoming a crack addict, but her situation might be hardly more glamorous than the one I was in, and I dreaded that thought for Will’s sake.

This woman discovered crack just recently, by a fluke chance encounter with a girlfriend from high school who took her to a motel and showed her the pleasures, for cash of course. She fell in love with it and liked this life of prostitution and drugs as if it were a grand step up. She said she hadn’t had an orgasm in years. Now she had them every night with different men and crack was an equal orgasm, every hit. She said she’d been missing life and now she was alive again. I didn’t go further in that drift of our conversation. I knew that if I became judgmental our talk would end on an unpleasant note and I wanted to hear more of her strange history.

But my mind did. I didn’t tell her it wouldn’t last, that no thrill that intense in human life lasts long, that in a few years she’d be a wreck, a toothless, unwanted street person, with broken health, wandering the slums and outskirts of town and into some marsh on some dark night in an intoxicated daze to be eaten by an alligator, (we saw a few in our parking lot near the airport right next to these marshes). Then Sanita came back to mind. Why did she pick Florida?

I could have mentioned to this woman the responsibilities she bore, her husband’s burden and grief, her children’s, but I didn’t. I saw she was too far gone in blind, hedonistic selfishness. They would sit and smoke crack in their underwear, hands all over each other, jump under the covers even before I turned off my light, then keep me awake with their loud love making. She liked Craig for his talents in bed, told him so in my hearing, told him she loved him. But she only came to our room on Friday and Saturday nights when he had crack. The other five nights she was puffing and probably moaning in someone else’s room, any ugly jerk or low-life with money. Crack came first, sex, (the payoff for the crack) second, her health and future not even a distant third.

She looked great at this early stage, slim and sexy, and her skin still unblemished. I suspect she’d even lost ten or twenty pounds in these three months from so much sex exercise and not eating much, maybe one quick meal a day, or one milkshake, the favorite of the eighteen year old whores. Her mind was still sharp, except in judgment. But it wouldn’t be for long. It would become a blurred fog of faces and forgotten names and ever more depraved and derelict scenes.

Old age would never even be a possibility, unless someone rescued her.

I wondered how long she’d last in this pit of snakes and self-degradation. I figured maybe a year before something really bad happened to her, besides the inevitable bouts V.D’s. That was a given. She’d end up in a hospital or jail cell or worse, the morgue. Repatriation with her family was the least of these possibilities. In a year she’d be very damaged goods and a second chance at middle-class normalcy as a former wife would be impossible.

They say there are second chances in America. But I’ve only seen that apply to men. Even if she had the best loving and forgiving husband, the children would never forget her delinquency. And her former middle class social set, especially the women, would be wolverines, while their husbands would wonder how wild she was still and if she had diseases, nudged by their wives if they stared at her at some barbecue.

But another thought doubles back to refute me. I said, ‘nothing that intense in human life lasts long’. I’m wrong here. Any great passion in art, music or literature, (or any deep interest in some field of science) can be an intense, life-long pursuit. The mind, with focus and effort, can forever foster and strengthen such rewarding interests. Only artificial highs, fake and not earned, are temporary and damaging. Anything you buy for money, (except food) and use up in an hour is just that, a fleeting pleasure that vanishes without a trace of personal benefit, only the regret when it’s gone.

I was getting sick of it rapidly, the place, the job, all of Florida. Sanita had moved with Mark away from Orlando a few weeks after I arrived. The number was disconnected. So my plan of visiting Willy was foiled. I started calling Buddy in New Jersey. He said he had a sound studio to build in Manhattan and wanted me with him the day it started. I was saving my money up, about three hundred a week and was eager to fly there, telling him what a pit Florida was, without the ugly details.

I spent only four weeks in my private residence. Buddy’s job began. I picked up Gomez every morning like a courier and found out some amazing stories. Our well-groomed supervisor, often wearing cologne, smug and professional sitting behind his desk was another unexpected crack addict and Gomez was now his supplier.

We drove to a trailer park west of Orlando one Saturday with the stupid name of ‘Weeki Wachee’, to score him some two hundred dollars of the stuff. He had a wife and child but would stay in his trailer most weekends, telling them he had so much work to do, puffing away, doors locked, just another victim of that twisted state, peeking out the closed blinds of his window every fifteen minutes in a growing state of paranoia and finally sleeping in his chair.

I did have one small, sweet, bit of revenge on the ‘bulldog’. He’d yelled at me a few times during those last weeks, for no other reason than that he was pure bile, and as he walked around had to yell at everybody, as if to validate himself in his contorted mind. It bothered me that at my age I had to hear such abuse, as if I was in the third grade again accosted by some fat bully.

But I didn’t. The weekend before I’d made final plans to fly to Manhattan and hadn’t told anyone. That Monday morning he made the mistake of screaming at me because I was the last one on the bus, holding up the whole crew, possibly thirty seconds.

I turned on him, sitting at his spot on the two front seats, (one wasn’t big enough) a fat blob of a creature, and told him this was it, I was quitting, all because of him and his foul, ugly mouth, that he was the worst foreman I’d ever met and this was all going straight back to the supervisor. I told him he deserved to lose his job over this.

This took him aback and he had nothing to reply, tongue-tied, as no one before on that job site had ever stood up to him. Only the many scars on his face told a different story. And those probably happened in some dingy bar.

When I did inform everyone that day I was quitting that Friday I had a few strange, conversations over the week. The bulldog said nothing to me, definitely worried. The supervisor and the bulldog’s friend ‘Jim’ came to me privately and asked if I might change my mind, that I could be put on a different crew at the other end of the building. But I told them the insults were just too severe for any quality electrician my age to swallow. Find someone else to take make place, some wimp, and ‘good luck’ finding talent.

Gomez accompanied me to the airport, by taxi. In the bar before the flight he thanked me for all the work I’d provided him, almost teary-eyed, and predicted that he wouldn’t last a week there without me. And he didn’t. He was fired for his obvious addiction and made his way back to Puerto Rico.

I met him six years later in Rincon where he was visibly diminished in health and looks, living in a hut in a ravine for free, broke and happy to see me. But he was instrumental in helping me sell my plot, introducing me to the buyer. I gave him half a dozen nights out at restaurants in return and a few hundred dollars for Jean to dole out to him in small amounts, as he’d spend it all on crack, which I’m sure he did.

Gomez 2004. free jpg file

That island was a cautionary tale with a thousand examples to any American who stayed awhile. It helped formed the writing style, (or at least the mentality) of Hunter S. Thompson, unluckily posted there for several years as a reporter in the early sixties. It probably even contributed in large part to this account, for whatever it’s worth, such a strange and warped tropical island, bringing the American landscape into sharper focus, and all the flaws of both.

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